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Monday, February 17, 2014

France: What North African anti-Semites learned from the French

You might think that, given the gruesome racism of French Algeria, the Arab gangs of the banlieues (squalid housing estates encircling Paris and other cities) would despise no one more than the nominally Christian descendents of their colonial oppressors.

Wrong. It’s French Jews they really hate. Worse, Jew-hatred isn’t confined to gangs. Hussey spells this out in uncompromising language that you don’t expect from a contributor to the BBC and Guardian, which shy away from exposing non-white racism.

Anti-Semitism thrives in the banlieues, says Hussey: young people’s chatter is full of references to sale juif, sale yid, sale feuj (backslang), even youtre, an old slang word derived from the German Jude that carries overtones of the deportations of Vichy.

(...)

I can derive only one comforting thought from Hussey’s brilliant book: Muslim Jew-hatred in France is so deeply rooted in that country’s native anti-Semitism that it’s unlikely to be replicated in Britain. Half a million French Jews, on the other hand, face an unnerving future.